Modern telephone systems provide a number of mechanisms for the indirect or alternate billing of a given telephone call. For example, a calling party may request that a call be charged to a particular telephone credit card number, to a third party, or to the called party (i.e., a collect call). To avoid fraud, such alternate billing services are preferably subjected to a validation procedure before the call is allowed to proceed.
The first large scale system adopted for validating credit card calls utilizes a nationwide collection of databases containing the required validation information. To participate, a given telephone company places its validation data in one of such databases, so that it will be available to all telephone companies through which a call may be initiated. Unfortunately, as further described below, this system does not permit the telephone company that provided the validation data to bill the companies that use or transport the data.
The U.S. telephone systems are constantly undergoing modernization, and are presently being upgraded by the addition of digital common channel signaling networks to the existing voice network. In the resulting composite network, validation data will be stored in a plurality of distributed databases, each distributed database being maintained by a particular telephone company or, more commonly, by a group of telephone companies such as in a Regional Bell Operating Company. In the new system, each distributed database can determine the number of validation requests received, broken down by the initiators of the requests. Further, this system will also be used to transport call setup information between the switching nodes of the existing telephone network. However the system being deployed is not presently equipped with the capability of billing based upon the actual use of validation data accessed in any of the distributed databases, or for the transport of call setup information. There therefore exists an unmet need for an improved tracking system for information transfers which will provide for an accurate assignment of costs based on such services.